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D.A. Powell
Douglas A. Powell (born May 16, 1963) is an American poet.D. A. Powell, Academy of American Poets, Poets.org, Feb. 2, 2012. Life Powell was born in Albany, Georgia. He lived in various places growing up, then graduated high school from Lindhurst High School in Linda, California. He then worked in a number of jobs before eventually settling in Santa Rosa, California, where he attended Sonoma State University. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1991 and a master's in 1993. Not long after completing his graduate work at Sonoma State, he entered the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 1996, he graduated from Iowa and began a career as a poet and university professor. Powell has taught at a number of different universities, including Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University, and Harvard University, where he served as the Briggs-Copeland lecturer in poetry. In 2004, Powell left Harvard for the the University of San Francisco, where he teaches in the English department.http://www.usfca.edu/facultydetails.aspx?id=4294969495 Writing Considered by some an experimental poet, Powell mixes both conventional and non-conventional techniques. For example, his early poems do not have titles; the first lines serve as the poems' working titles. He also does not capitalize the first letter of a new sentence. In this sense, he is reminiscent of E.E. Cummings; however Powell's poems are more edgy. His work often moves back and forth between popular culture like movies and music and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS; he uses numerous rhetorical devices, especially puns, as bridges between these 2 spheres of experience. Powell's first 3 books of poems are considered a kind of trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Writing in the New York Times, critic Stephen Burt said of Powell's work, "No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible."http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/da-powell Recognition In addition to serving as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard (itself a recognition of both creative and scholarly talent),http://www.usfca.edu/Newsroom/Learning/USF_Poet_s_Success_is_Chronic/ Powell has won the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Paul Engle Fellowship. His second collection, Lunch, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and his third book, Cocktails, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. On February 3, 2010, after the publication of Chronic in 2009, Claremont Graduate University announced that Powell had won its prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2010 link Chronic also won the 2009 Northern California Book Award and the 2009 California Book Award. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.http://www.gf.org/fellows/17035-d-a-powell Publications Poetry *''Tea''. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-8195-6334-7 *''Lunch''. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press / Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 978-0-8195-6427-6 * Cocktails. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004. ISBN 978-1-55597-395-7 * Chronic. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-55597-516-6 *''Useless Landscape; or, A guide for boys''. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012. 978-1-55597-695-8 *''Repast''. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014. 978-1-55597-696-5 Non-fiction *''By Myself: An autobiography'' (with David Trinidad). New York: Turtle Point Press, 2009. Edited *''Dunstan Thompson: On the life and work of a lost American master'' (edited with Kevin Prufer). Warrensburg, MO: Pleiades Press, 2010. *''Best New Poets 2011: 50 poems from emerging writers'' (edited with Jazzy Danzinger & Jeff Livingood). Charlottesville, VA: Samovar Press, 2011. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:D A Powell, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 12, 2015. See also * List of U.S. poets References Notes External links ;Poems *Panic in the Year Zero, a new poem for Harvard Class Day, "Panic in the Year Zero", May 26, 2010 *[http://triquarterly.org/bios/da-powell Two poems in Triquarterly] *D.A. Powell profile & 8 poems at the Academy of American Poets *D.A. Powell b. 1963 at the Poetry Foundation ;Audio / video *D.A. Powell at YouTube *A Poetry Reading by Powell from The New York Times ;Books *D.A. Powell at Amazon.com ;About *A View to a Kill- D.A. Powell's blog. *Interview with D.A. Powell in Nashville Review *Interview about Powell's "corydon and alexis, redux", 2010 Category:American poets Category:1963 births Category:Living people Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni Category:21st-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:Sonoma State University alumni